A Mouth Like Yours - Hardcover

Duane, Daniel

2.67

27 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374217327 ISBN 13: 9780374217327

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

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A brutally honest novel about love and illusion from the author of Caught Inside

Cassius Harper, ambivalent child of the seventies, is leading a modest and respectable life in San Francisco's flush nineties: he has a promising doctoral thesis, a doting new lover, the company of old friends and adoring parents, even a rent-controlled apartment by the beach where he's surfed all his life. So why the upwelling of nameless dread? Why the regret after cocktail parties and the road rage and, worst of all, the certainty that he is somehow a stranger to himself? Harper has always seen transformative love as the heart's salvation; but he's found his elusive ideal only twice, with miserable consequences. A Mouth Like Yours tells of a third and grand collision, with the vulnerable, volatile, and addictive Joanie Artois.

So quickly does Harper lose himself in Joanie, so thoroughly does she colonize his heart, that he sets out to understand why, exactly, love always unmans him this way. Exploring what carnal love can do for us and what it cannot, A Mouth Like Yours is a poignant statement about the growing pains of a generation.

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About the Author:

Daniel Duane is the author of Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast (NPP, 1996) and Looking for Mo (FSG, 1998). He lives in San Francisco

From Publishers Weekly:

Duane (Looking for Mo) tracks the emotional meanderings of Berkeley grad student Cassius Harper in this meticulous study of the ambivalence and romantic bewilderment of privileged American 20-somethings. Harp is half-involved in a sparkless relationship with a fellow grad student when he falls for Joan Artois, a magnetic neurotic familiar to anyone who's seen a Woody Allen film. Though Joan's self-knowledge results in statements like "I'm surprisingly immature for my age. I'm only just starting to realize it," Harp finds her irresistible, and his occasionally claustrophobic first-person narration offers a second-by-second account of his affair with this "most exquisitely sexual and vulnerable girl-woman." Harp's other lover, the politically correct Shauna Rose, is mostly left to pine for him, keeping pots of vegan soup on the stove, stocking seminal postmodern theory texts as bathroom reading, and waiting futilely for him to decide to be with her "for real." With much time spent on Harp's vanilla sexuality and Joan's considerably wilder desires, the novel could be read as a kind of sexual coming-of-age tale—but the plot is slim, and the character development slimmer still, though Duane offers moments of keen observation and emotional lucidity. (Aug.)
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